Question

I normally found three ways of using MYSQL insert Command

INSERT INTO `table` (field1, field2, field3) VALUES ('value1', 'value2', 'value3');

or

INSERT INTO `table` VALUES ('value1', 'value2', 'value3');

or

INSERT INTO `table` SET `field1`='value1', `field2`='value2', `field3`='value3';

Is there any differences among these?

Answer 1

The first two are standard SQL; the third one is non-standard and specific to MySQL, derived from the standard syntax for UPDATE.

The difference between the first two is that one specifies the fields that you want to insert, which is more flexible because you can miss out fields if you’re happy with them being set to NULL. Also specifying the fields means that the statement will still work if the table layout changes; if you don’t specify the fields you’re relying on the table never changing.